Anais Nin (1903 – 1977)
Born Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was a French-born author of Spanish, Cuban, and Danish descent who became famous for her published journals, which span more than sixty years, and for her erotica.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.
I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. "The cult of the marvelous." Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.
The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.
I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.
Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, of fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.
My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.
There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience...
When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.
My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea and my eyes are the color of water. I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self. I remember my first birth in water.
To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.
We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.
It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action.
Love reduces the complexity of living.
People living deeply have no fear of death.